Wars in Africa wipe out aid gains

[Kilo]

Wars in Africa wipe out aid gains

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44168000/jpg/_44168712_ethiopiansoldiers_ap203b.jpg Money spent on war meant less money spent on development

A report on armed conflict in Africa has shown that the cost to the continent's development over a 15-year period was nearly $300bn (£146bn).

The research was undertaken by a number of non-governmental organisations, including Oxfam.
It says the cost of conflict was equal to the amount of money received in aid during the same period.
This is the first time analysts have calculated the overall effects of armed violence on development.
The report says that between 1990 and 2005, 23 African nations were involved in conflict, and on average this cost African economies $18bn a year.
It concludes that African governments have taken encouraging steps at a regional level to control arms transfers, but that what is needed is a global, legally-binding arms trade treaty.
The president of Liberia, which is just starting to recover from a long civil war, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, also wrote the preface to the report.
She told the BBC "the proliferation of weapons is a key driver in armed conflicts".
"We need to restrict the supply of guns to African conflict zones - and an arms trade treaty is a vital way to do this", she said.
Ongoing burden
The BBC's Johannesburg correspondent Peter Biles says that some costs of war, such as increased military spending and a struggling economy continue long after the fighting has stopped.
Liberia's Defence Minister, Brownie Samukai told the BBC's Network Africa programme that to his knowledge expenditure this year alone included sums of $11m and $35m "for training, equipment, facilities, buildings and construction - a combination of these types of expenditure."


http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/shared/img/o.gif http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44168000/gif/_44168914_africa_conflict203x249.gif
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/img/v3/inline_dashed_line.gif

Does war make Africa poor? (http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/nol/thread.jspa?forumID=3664&edition=2)


The researchers say that although the number of armed conflicts is falling in Africa there is no room for complacency, with little hope of a swift settlement in either Sudan or Somalia.
And some experts argue that Africa actually needs to increase its arms spending.
Haneelmoed Heitman - the Africa correspondent for Jane's Defence - told the BBC "in a lot of countries the primary problem is that the national security forces are too small, too ill-equipped and too ill-trained to actually provide any sort of security".
He cites the example of Cameroon which has some 12,500 troops to cover around 400,000 sq kms with no transport or reconaissance aircraft.
"Without helicopters for tactical movement", says Mr Heitman, "it's physically impossible for them to deploy to counter banditry or insurgency".
He concludes that most African countries need to spend more on military equipment - but primarily on transport such as helicopters to allow them to mobilise to deploy against the "bad guys".


STUDY (PDF) (http://www.saferworld.org.uk/images/pubdocs/bp107_Africa%27s%20missing%20billions%20paper_FINAL%20ENGLISH_041007.pdf)

[Maktab]

This study is a load of absolute nonsense. And rather predictably so, considering that it was drawn up by NGOs like Oxfam who have proven time and time again that they neither truly understand problems in Africa nor have any idea about what real solutions entail. Thanks to their anti-capitalist and anti-free trade approach, they've done far more to retard the development of the people they claim to be saving than most people realise.

Fact is, weapons are not a cause of Africa's misery, they are merely a symptom of its dysfunctionality. The Hutus in Rwanda for the most part required only pangas to carry out the quickest murder of 800 000 people the world has ever seen, whilst the Janjaweed in Darfur carry out their slaughter with only the most basic of weapons. Instability is driven not by fighter planes, tanks and ships, but by the kind of light weapons that are easily smuggled even if banned. A global arms treaty designed to limit state arms purchases will change nothing, it might actually make things worse.

Which is where Helmoed Romer Heitman (the BBC got his name wrong) made such a simple yet profound point. Half the problem in most African countries is that the state lacks the ability to patrol the vast majority of their territory, let alone offer meaningful protection to all their citizens. This weakness of central governments leads directly to the kind of power vacuum that permits rebel groups and criminal syndicates to rise and operate with relative impunity, destabilising countries and terrorising their people. By arbitrarily limiting the ability of African states to buy weaponry and equipment, Oxfam et al are actually helping to ensure that this dangerous vacuum continues to exist.

Fact is, contrary to popular belief (and hippie peacenik teachings), not all military or police spending is bad. Yeah, it's trendy to claim that every gun bought takes food from the mouth of a starving child, but the complacent and pampered leftists of the US and Europe have forgotten just how important basic human security is. A full stomach isn't much comfort when you're getting raped to and from school every day, nor does 'sustainable farming' matter much when you're at the mercy of local gangs and warlords with the power to wipe out all you have ever done whenever the urge strikes. Without human security, without an environment in which people feel safe to go about their daily business, to live normal lives and to trust others, there can be no development and no progress.

So limiting arms sales to African countries will do nothing to solve this fundamental problem, nor will it really help those unlucky enough to be stuck in many African countries. But it will make Oxfam and all the other fools engaged in this *feel* better, which I suppose is all that really matters.

[Rictor]

Alright, fair enough, It's a plausible arguement. But it's common knowledge that tinpot African dictatorships are not in the habit of using the weapons that they are sold to provide human security, at least not universally. Which leads me to believe that the problem is not the weapons, but how any given government chooses to use them.

As for aid to Africa, I read in interview in Speigel Online a while ago with an African economist who claims that it is the aid itself which is perpetuating the poverty by flooding the market with things like donated clothing or subsidized European food, which makes it impossible for locals to undercut the foreign goods and therefore develop a domestic industry.

[Maktab]

Fair point. I didn't mean to imply that things would suddenly be ok if African governments had all the weaponry they wanted, because that's obviously not true. Most African governments don't give a damn about their peoples' safety or welfare, so they probably wouldn't use their security forces for good even if they had a decent army. But the end conclusion, which you've also pointed out, is that focusing on weaponry as being the problem is simplistic and unlikely to solve anything. Besides, it's far simpler to (and smarter) to embargo specific countries than it is to create some meaningless treaty that prevents even the good guys from getting weaponry.

And I agree with you on foreign aid. Not only does it foster dependency, but because it's usually given with few strings attached and little requirement for accountability, it actually makes corruption worse. I don't recall the exact details, but I read a report recently which sought to investigate just what portion of EU foreign aid intended to increase the salaries of teachers in a West African country actually reached the intended recipients. They discovered that only about 5% of the money at best actually got to the teachers, the other 95% being swallowed up along the way by government officials each taking their cut in turn. Naturally, that foreign aid ended up just making a bad problem worse.

Ultimately though, the real problem is that too many people are enamoured with the 'feel-good' approach. Foreign aid feels good, so it must be good, right? Stopping African governments from buying weaponry so they're forced to spend it on food aid (or something) also feels good, so how can it be wrong? There just aren't enough people willing to look at a policy or idea logically, and judging it not by how it makes you feel but on what the end results will be. Which is why we've got a ton of NGOs which make people feel good by taking their donated (or taxed) money and roaring around the third world with it, but all too often either do nothing to solve the problems or actively (if inadvertently) work to make them worse. People need to open their eyes.

[afreu]

After talking so much about where all the naive third world friends from Europe are wrong, what do you think? How should development policy for African nations look like?

[Maktab]

Free trade, accountability, full and protected property rights, a focus on political changes that permit ordinary people to build businesses and wealth without being overly weighed down by red tape, ridiculous laws and corrupt officials, the building of institutions designed to support people in those endeavours and, once a government has shown itself it be worthy of it, military and police training and funding to permit them to extend security throughout the country.

Yet it would be wrong to assume there's a simple solution to this. There isn't, and our hunt for a one-size-fits-all simplistic solution only sets us further back every time one gets tried. Each country will require a different approach with different solutions.

But most importantly, all the solutions from outside are never going to work if African leaders aren't willing to actually make the necessary changes and reforms to move towards a Western and Asian style of governance. It won't help if governments appoint political cronies rather than competent individuals throughout every single government department, rendering them effectively useless even as they swallow ever greater amounts of money. You need to look only at the ANC in South Africa, which is in charge of the richest, most well-developed and most skilled country in Africa, yet is doing its level best to screw it all up. Most other African governments are no better, many are far worse. If you can figure out just why it is that African countries in general get such awful governments and how to prevent it from happening, you're going to be a *long* way towards solving this continent's problems. But don't hold your breath, because nobody's really succeeded in answering that question yet.

[B_Soldier]

I'm just glad to see that it wasn't so messed up that we didn't end up on the list, but most people think Africa is a country. Or at least that's the impression we get sometimes.